The economy isn’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. That, at least, is the conclusion drawn by none other than U.S. News & World Report’s eminence grise Mortimer Zuckerman, in a July 14 article in the Wall Street Journal.

With plunging advertising revenue across the industry, McGraw-Hill is reportedly putting BusinessWeek up for sale. The company said only that it is exploring “strategic options” for the magazine so far, but according to sources cited in Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, investment bank Evercore Partners Inc., has been hired to facilitate the sale.

“Consumer prices shot up in June by the largest amount in 11 months,” the Washington Postreported June 15, “reflecting the biggest jump in gasoline prices in nearly five years.” The 0.7 percent June increase in the Consumer Price Index represents an annual rate of more than eight percent as well as the first consumer symptom of the hyper-inflation the Federal Reserve created over the past year.

President Obama’s Auto Task Force Chairman Steven Rattner resigned suddenly earlier this week after reports that the New York Attorney General’s office was investigating Rattner’s role in a New York State pension bribery scandal.

More...

Weeks before it was supposed to happen, a bankruptcy judge has approved the restructuring of large portions of once-mighty GM and the liquidation of the automaker’s remaining assets. Under the plan, announced last Sunday, the “new GM” being created will be under 60-percent control by the federal government.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute’s Howard S. Katz has revealed that the Federal Reserve Bank has inflated the U.S. currency to unprecedented levels since September 2008 and that it is hiding the fact. Katz cited a Federal Reserve letter he received in response to an inquiry where the Fed admitted that its Open Market Committee stated it “has increased the Fed balance sheet to levels never before seen.”

Asked by This Week’s George Stephanopoulos about the Obama Administration’s terrible economic prognostications in advance of passage of the $787 billion “stimulus” spending bill back in February, Vice President Joe Biden regurgitated a familiar talking point:

Just days after Vice President Joe Biden told George Stephanopoulos that it was “premature” to push for another “stimulus” spending bill, Obama economic adviser Laura D’Andrea Tyson told a seminar in Singapore on July 7, "We should be planning on a contingency basis for a second round of stimulus." Though Tyson is a member of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, she said in the speech she was speaking for herself and not for the administration.

Item: Writing in the online Newsweek for June 2, Daniel Gross observed: “It’s been a long time since American devotees of Marx … have had much to cheer about. But with the bankruptcy filings of General Motors and Chrysler, and the transfer of stock ownership from the firms’ long-suffering shareholders to the government and unions, communists of the world can rejoice. The workers are now, finally, significant owners of the means of production. The United Auto Workers control about 65 percent of Chrysler and 17.5 percent of General Motors.”

As the Internal Revenue Service continues its hunt for tax dodgers, Swiss banks are refusing to open accounts for Americans and closing the ones that already exist. The tax collectors aim to recover an estimated $50 billion in unpaid taxes by pressuring Americans to voluntarily declare offshore accounts by September 23 — or face possible criminal prosecution and fines.